Monday, May 11, 2009

Harper’s income trust tax was designed to benefit Canada’s large life companies like Manulfe and Power Corp’s London Life and Great West Life and to extend their monopoly on Canadians retirement savings choices. Meanwhile Obama is beefing up and enforcing anti-trust measures to prevent monopolist actions, that US Justice Department’s Head of antitrust division said helped contribute to the global economic meltdown.U.S. to make antitrust policy tougher: reportMon May 11, 2009

(Reuters) - The U.S. government plans to reverse its antitrust policy and put more pressure on companies eyeing bigger market share through their dominance, the New York Times reported on its website.

Christine Varney, head of the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division, will announce the policy reversal in a speech on Monday at the Center for American Progress, the paper said, citing people who she consulted about the policy shift.

The changed policy will be a reversal from that of the Bush administration, during which not a single case against a dominant firm was lodged for violating the antimonopoly law, the paper said.

Varney is expected to say it was a major mistake during the outset of the Great Depression to relax antitrust enforcement, that enabled many large companies to engage in pricing, wage and collusive practices that harmed consumers and took years to reverse, the paper added.

Ineffective government regulation, she argued, is contributing to the current economic problems.

"As antitrust enforcers, we cannot sit on the sidelines any longer," she said, adding that new legislation may be needed to improve policing of the marketplace.

Her division has also launched a program designed to find fraud or anticompetitive collusion surrounding the government's $787 billion economic stimulus package.

Income-trust crackdown: The inside storyWhen the telephone rang, Flaherty knew he had to actGlobe and MailNovember 2, 2006

High-profile directors and CEOs, meanwhile, had approached Mr. Flaherty personally to express their concerns: Many felt they were being pressed into trusts because of their duty to maximize shareholder value, despite their misgivings about the structure. Paul Desmarais Jr., the well-connected chairman of Power Corp. of Canada, even railed against trusts in a conversation with Prime Minister Stephen Harper during a trip to Mexico.

EVENTS

Income Trust Halloween VigilThanks to all who participated in both the Ottawa and Calgary vigils to mark the anniversary of the announcement.

WE"D LIKE SOME ANSWERS

As you well know, the ‘income trust thing’ has grown beyond the
question of whether fair taxes are paid on income from trusts. It’s
become a giant dirty snowball, and as it rolls forward it accumulates
more and more bulk. There are so many unanswered questions. Let's list a few and invite our "Accountable" government and our free press to provide some much-needed answers.

It is said “Trusts are inefficient use of capital. Why?” Two
related questions are ‘Whose money is it, anyway?’, and ‘Do Canadian
investors have a free and efficient market?’

How can information that is already in the public domain at SEDAR
make for a state secret? How could such information be used to harm
the Canadian national interest? And who would cause the harm?

Why won’t the Canadian media investigate the falsehoods and
misrepresentations told by the Minister of Finance to a committee of
Parliament? Was the Minister in contempt of Parliament?

Why won’t the Canadian media report (a) government tax revenues
gained from BCE in 2006 when BCE was a corporation to (b) government
tax revenues that would be gained in 2007 from BCE, if BCE had been
allowed to proceed to a trust, and (c) government tax revenues that
will be gained in 2007 from BCE, when BCE ownership has been carved
up as 45% foreign ownership and 55% large Canadian pension fund
ownership?